One morning in 2017, Luis A. Miranda Jr. — a Democratic political strategist and the father of “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda — knew that something bad was happening to him.
Driving in New York City, he felt acute pain and realized that he was having a heart attack. He headed for the hospital but delayed getting to the ER because he thought it was ridiculous to pay $50 for two-hour parking. Instead, he drove around until he found a parking spot. Before a team of doctors whisked him away for surgery, he asked them if it could be done in two hours, because he had to go move his car.
Now the irrepressible Miranda, 69, is out with a new memoir, “Relentless: My Story of the Latino Spirit That is Transforming America.” In it, he recounts his rise as a young activist from Puerto Rico who went on to become one of the country’s most influential Latino Democratic political advisers and philanthropists. “My journey as a Puerto Rican in New York,” he writes, “is both intensely personal and entirely representative of Latinos across the United States.”
Writing his memoir was an emotional experience, Miranda said, “because there were some passages in my life … that were very personal and sad.” The hardest part was writing about the devastating impact Hurricane Maria had on Puerto Rico: The 2017 hurricane destroyed his parents’ home and plunged the island into crisis. Miranda’s efforts to raise money and aid for Puerto Rico’s recovery were the subject of the 2020 documentary, “Siempre, Luis.”
Miranda grew up in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, and intended to pursue a Ph.D. in political sociology when he arrived in New York City in 1974. But he has lived his life, he told NBC News, “on managed impulse.”
“I feel when something is right, quickly figure (it) out intellectually, if my head and my heart are in the same place,” Miranda said. “And then I move accordingly. And I tell myself … as long as you give yourself a chance, then you do whatever needs to be done.”
Miranda knew as a young man that his “purpose in life was political.” His first date with his wife, Luz, was a march outside the U.S. Supreme Court, to protest a ruling on higher education.
In “Relentless,” which is out on May 7, Miranda describes his political evolution, from a young, idealistic socialist enmeshed in the politics of his island home to becoming an activist in New York and later a national political and philanthropic presence. His shift was in part driven by economic reality; when his son Lin-Manuel was born in 1980, the family was living without medical coverage.
After working for several nonprofit organizations, in the 1980s Miranda went to work at City Hall under Mayor Ed Koch, heading the Office of Hispanic Affairs and going on to serve in two other mayoral administrations. In 1990 Miranda became founding president of the Hispanic Federation, one of the country’s leading Latino advocacy groups.
“Luis built an organization that was about legacy and the future,” said Frankie Miranda (no relation), the federation’s president and CEO. “Luis saw the need for an inclusive, pan-Latino vision for this organization, rather than one that only represented one segment of our community.”
The Hispanic Federation was a first responder when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and has distributed over $53 million to nonprofits on the island.
Many organizations falter after their initial leadership leaves, Frankie Miranda pointed out. “But Luis built an organization that was not about one person, it was community, and the diversity in our communities.”
As a strategist in New York, Luis Miranda worked on the successful Senate campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. He helped Adriano Espaillat become the first Dominican American elected to Congress in 2016, after seeing the growth of Dominican and other Latino immigrants in New York City, and was a lead consultant in the election of Letitia James as public advocate in 2013, the first African American woman elected to citywide office in New York.
The biggest mistake that candidates make when it comes to Latino voters, Miranda said, is “to take us for granted, to believe that we’re Democrats, that we’re with them 100 percent of the time and that we’re going to come out and vote.” In many communities, he believes, Latino voters are “persuadable Democrats,” not necessarily base Democrats.
‘The best decision of our lives’
In a foreward to “Relentless,” Lin-Manuel Miranda praises Luis as “a fierce, loyal friend, a supportive father … and a doting grandfather.”
In fact, when Lin-Manuel was offered a full-time teaching job while struggling to complete his first Broadway play, “In the Heights,” his father told him not to take the job, because if he did, he would never finish it. “In the Heights” became a hit, winning the 2008 Tony for best musical.
In 2015, Luis Miranda and his wife mortgaged their home in Washington Heights — the only real asset they owned — to help raise money for the Broadway production of “Hamilton.” Miranda calls this, in hindsight, “the best decision of our lives.”
Luz Miranda-Crespo, Luis’ daughter and the chief financial officer at the MirRam Group, which Luis Miranda co-founded in 2000, describes her father as “a nonstop kind of person.” She was not surprised by the chapter in “Relentless” in which he details plans for his own funeral, including guests and song selections, “because that is just how he lives his life, planning for every contingency…Impossible is not a word in his vocabulary.”
Growing up, Miranda-Crespo remembers that her father used to blast music at 6 a.m. to wake everyone up. “He would blast whatever was his favorite song that week on the record player, whether it was from ‘Flashdance,’ ‘Dirty Dancing’ or from old musicals.”
“My first love was show tunes,” Luis Miranda writes in “Relentless,” and movie musicals have indeed played an important role in his life — a love he passed on to Lin-Manuel, whose name has become synonymous with Broadway after the wild success of “Hamilton.”
Miranda said he was inspired to move to New York City by the character Debbie Reynolds played in the 1964 film, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” For Miranda, meeting Debbie Reynolds in 2010 was “one of the best days of my life. … I thought I was going to die.”
“The Sound of Music,” however, is Miranda’s true obsession. He has seen the iconic movie over 140 times, and even visited the Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont. On a family trip to Austria, he made his entire family perform the “Do-Re-Mi” song for an elaborate home movie.
“We actually ran through the streets of Salzburg, just like the Von Trapp family did many years ago, singing ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and making sure that we created our own family bond around ‘The Sound of Music,’” Miranda said.
Becoming ‘Lin-Manuel’s dad’
After nearly four decades working in the public and private sector, Miranda is at peace with the fact that most people know him as “Lin-Manuel’s dad.”
“We come as migrants and immigrants to this country, to make sure that the next generation does better,” said Miranda, reflecting how Puerto Ricans who were born and raised there sometimes identify more as immigrants, even though it is a U.S. territory, since the culture and life on the tropical island is so different from New York and other states.
“I am known as ‘Lin-Manuel’s dad,’ which means that my belief that another generation could be ahead of me has been accomplished,” Miranda said. He noted that the success of “Hamilton” has provided his family with a platform to support causes they believe in, as well as the resources to give back to their community.
Lin-Manuel has credited his dad as an inspiration for “Hamilton”— Founding Father Alexander Hamilton also arrived in New York from the Caribbean; he was from the island of Nevis. “When I was playing him, I was just playing my father,” Lin-Manuel has said.
When Miranda is asked if he ever tires of people asking him for tickets to see his son’s award-winning musical, he said, “Never, never!”
“You never get tired of good things. And seeing ‘Hamilton,’ which is not only an incredible piece of art that changed Broadway forever, is also knowing that the son of Puerto Rican migrants is the one who writes it,” he added. “So I don’t care, I’ll be making sure that people get tickets to ‘Hamilton’ forever.”
